What is Symbolic Music

This chapter provides an overview of the relatively young but increasingly important domain of Music Information Retrieval, an Information Retrieval subdomain, which investigates efficient and intelligent methods to analyze, recognize, retrieve and organize music. After describing the background and the problems that are addressed by research in this domain the chapter gives a brief introduction to methods for the extraction of semantic descriptors from music, which are fundamental to a great number of tasks in Music Information Retrieval. In the subsequent sections, music retrieval, music classification and music library visualization systems are described. All of these systems are developed for the purpose of enhancing organization, access and retrieval in potentially large digital music libraries.